


A Spy in the House of Usher

by thingswithteeth



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Canon Compliant, Eldritch Bureaucracy, Gen, Original Character Death(s), Statement Fic, The Usher Foundation, and probably do some crime, international woman of mystery and local goth solve crime, so far at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-11-23 07:57:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20888744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: Case 0142410. Four statements taken at the Usher Foundation, Washington D.C., 25th October 2014. Statements taken directly.The situation had been past salvaging long before Gertrude's arrival at the Usher Foundation.





	1. Rosalie

_Case 0142410. Statement of Rosalie Nowak, regarding a body. Usher Foundation, Washington D.C., 25th October 2014. Statement taken directly. _

Gertrude speaks to the caretaker first. She reasons that the woman was the one to find the body, which allows her to at least maintain the appearance that she’s not yielding to Gerard’s wishes on the matter.

When she had asked him if he had an opinion on the order in which she spoke to the Usher Foundation’s staff, she hadn’t actually expected him to offer one; the boy will dig in his heels when he feels that he has cause, but mostly he’s content enough to follow along in her wake. That Gerard can still surprise her on occasion is—well, it’s potentially inconvenient, tactically speaking, but it does make her think better of him. Predictability in her associates is a trait that Gertrude has often found useful, but not particularly enjoyable on a personal level.

“Rosalie,” he had said, and responded to her arched eyebrow only by shrugging and adding, “She’s been here since before it was light out. Seems like we should let her get it over with and go home.”

She would be tempted to chalk that up to his mother’s influence, Mary’s stubborn pride in being working class, but Mary had also never been much concerned with the comfort – or wellbeing – of others. She’s not even remotely tempted to ascribe any of Gerard’s actions to Eric; Gertrude is not a sentimental enough woman to imagine there is much of a man who had been dead before Gerard had even figured out object permanence in him, beyond his boney knuckles and his smile and the color of his hair beneath the atrocious black dye that he insists on refreshing every time they stop somewhere long enough for him to realize that a half inch of roots have grown in along the hairline.

“Very well,” Gertrude says, and in short order the Foundation’s caretaker has been seated in Gertrude’s impromptu interrogation room: a small reading lounge on the first floor, the overhead fluorescents a starkly modern contrast to the Dresser wallpaper that had probably been hung nearly a century and a half earlier, bright yellow and orange cornflowers all now faded to an indistinct almost-gray and the edges curling away from the skirting board.

Gertrude flips open the file on the table in front of her. There’s nothing of much substance in it. She has a good memory for detail, and with every year she grows more reluctant to leave a paper trail of her activities. When she glances up from the file, she finds Rosalie looking, not at her and her conspicuously shuffled papers, but over Gertrude’s shoulder, to where she knows Gerard is perched on the arm of one of the room’s other chairs, an overstuffed olive green velvet monstrosity with the pile worn down almost to nothing.

“You’re not going to light that,” Rosalie says. It is very clearly not a question.

Gertrude generally doesn’t like being ignored unless she intends to be ignored, but she will admit to some curiosity over how this budding melodrama will play out. On the one hand, Gerard can be contrary as a cat, and years of draping himself in the trappings of rebellious counterculture have given him a knee-jerk disdain for direct orders from people he hasn’t already decided to oblige. On the other hand, he has a certain weakness for older women who speak to him in an authoritative voice, one which Gertrude herself has often taken advantage of.

“No,” Gerard says. He sounds a little indignant about it. Gertrude doesn’t think it’s offended innocence. He was almost certainly _intending_ to light his cigarette, because Gerard Keay fears neither God nor smoking bans. No, she thinks he’s probably indignant at the realization that he _does_ fear the disapproval of middle-aged building caretakers with no real power to do anything to him other than disapprove.

The thought is entertaining enough to keep Gertrude’s tone mild when she says, “If that’s settled, then?”

Rosalie shrugs and makes a vague gesture that seems to indicate that Gertrude should proceed.

“Who are you, please? For the record, you understand.”

“Rosalie Nowak.” She doesn’t question whether or not Gertrude has any right to be asking questions; few people ever do, even when Gertrude isn’t dragging the information out of them by force. She also doesn’t seem to notice that Gertrude’s pen against the paper isn’t moving. Inside her, Gertrude can feel something wide open and watching and hungry suddenly take notice. It’s uncomfortable, but she’s accustomed to it. “I guess that technically I work in facilities and maintenance, but really, I’m the janitor. The _only _janitor. I was—I’m always telling Tabby that she should hire someone else on if she really wants to keep all thirteen thousand old, dusty square feet of the place clean, but I don’t think she cares, as long as the bathrooms and documents storage are in order. I don’t even bother with getting the kitchen spotless anymore. The staff are animals. You should _see_ what the inside of the microwave looks like.” She frowns a little, like she’s uncertain of why she had offered so much in response to a simple inquiry as to her identity, but she doesn’t break eye contact with Gertrude.

Gertrude is accustomed to that, too.

“That’s Tabitha Huang, head librarian of the Usher Foundation.”

Rosalie tilts her head, and there’s a question in that but it’s one that goes unasked and unanswered, superseded by the fact that Gertrude asked first, and when she asks people tend to answer. 

“That’s her,” Rosalie says, and shrugs. “Tabby’s okay. I’ve been working here almost as long as she has, and she never forgets it—never acts like some twenty-five-year-old with an ego and the ink still drying on his resume knows more about what happens at the Foundation than I do, just because his parents paid his way through college.”

Almost all of Tabitha’s employees have, at the very least, a bachelor’s degree in library science or history or archival studies. Gertrude has always thought it rather quaint, as though the Eye particularly cares about the credentials of those who feed it. Tabitha ought to know better.

“Plus,” Rosalie says with a quick smile, and the smile is surprising, not what Gertrude would have expected from this prim little dumpling of a woman, wide and wolfish, “she’s given me every raise I’ve ever asked for.”

Behind her, Gerard makes a faint noise that Gertrude interprets as amusement. She takes her cue from him, and allows herself a small answering smile before ruining it almost immediately by saying, “Tell me about the body.”

Usually Gertrude wouldn’t sate the Beholding’s hunger even this much just to skip the small talk, but it—it’s been a long week, the kind that even she can feel a bit in her bones, and Rosalie Nowak isn’t the only one who deserves to leave the Usher Foundation sooner rather than later. “By _body_ you mean Sylvia Ibarra.” There’s a hint of reproach to her voice, but it fades as quickly as her smile had. “Yeah. I found her. I thought this was about Tabby’s disappearance?”

“We think the two might be linked.”

Gertrude does not think this.

“I’m not sure how,” Rosalie says, “and there’s not much to tell you.” Gertrude says nothing; she’s already said all that she needs to say, and Rosalie won’t require further prompting. Sure enough, Gertrude’s subject takes a deep breath and lets it out before continuing to speak. “I’m the first one here most mornings. Tabby and me, we set up my schedule when I first started, and my kids were in school back then. I liked to be able to pick them up in the afternoon, make dinner, and put them to bed at night, all of that. My youngest is doing her undergrad now, but I still like leaving work with some daylight left and—well, the librarians like not having to be here first thing to unlock the doors and put the coffee on. Besides, almost all of my real work is better done before the rest of the staff arrives and any visitors start tromping in and out. What few visitors we get, that is.

“It was a Tuesday. Three weeks ago? I don’t know why I’m saying that like I don’t remember. It’s not the kind of thing you forget, finding a body. Finding the body of someone—she was a nice kid, you know? The newest of the research assistants and still trying to impress by doing more than she really had to, so this time of year she usually got here while it was still dark out. Said that she liked to catch the early bus because it was less crowded, but I think she was just hoping that someone higher up would notice. No one else was here that time of day and we’d get to talking. I’d show her pictures of the grandkids, she’d tell me what she did over the weekend, we’re both watching Elementary, that kind of thing. Even brought me in coffee a time or two from some overpriced hipster place by her apartment; said one of the baristas had a little thing for her and would sometimes let her in before they were officially open. Like I said, nice kid.

“So yeah, I remember exactly when I—when we found out she was dead. September 29th, a little bit over three weeks ago. Closer to four, I guess, but... yeah. I showed up that morning around the usual time. The doors were locked but the alarm was disarmed and the lights were on, so I kind of figured that Sylvia beat me in. It didn’t happen a lot, but it happened sometimes, often enough that it wasn’t unusual, you know? I came in, dropped my bag in the break room, yelled _hello_, that sort of thing. Perfectly normal, only—.”

She pauses. This time, the deep breath she takes sounds a little shaky. Gertrude intends to wait her out, but Gerard—Gerard is, to borrow Rosalie Nowak’s phrasing, a _nice kid_. At the very least, he’s nicer than Gertrude is; she’s not ashamed to admit it, although he would undoubtedly be appalled to hear her say it. Or perhaps he’s simply impatient. “Only?”

“Only I thought I heard her yell back, okay?” Rosalie says, voice harsh and defensive, and Gertrude is familiar enough with this particular song and dance to be able to distinguish the kind of defensiveness that comes from sincere disbelief versus that which comes from the expectation of _being_ disbelieved, mixed liberally with the desire _not_ to believe. It’s a very specific tone; there’s the savor of truth to it. “I know she didn’t, but I heard it clear as day. _Hi, Mrs. Nowak_. She called me Mrs. Nowak, like my kids’ friends did growing up. It was cute and a lot more respectful than most of the new researchers are with me, so I never corrected her. _Hi, Mrs. Nowak, I’m down in the basement_. That’s what she said.

“It was weird. No one really goes down there much, not even me, not for more than a few minutes at a time because that’s where we keep the cleaning supplies and I’m the one who lets in pest control and gets them where they need to be. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That she’d gotten it in her head to tackle some kind of project down there, clean up the basement or dig through the discredited statements from the fifties, the ones that Tabby’s predecessor left down there to become nesting material for the mice and soak up any leaks in the winter. Like I told you, she was eager to get noticed.” Her next breath comes out wet. Gertrude has been Archivist for too long not to be inured to tears, but she hears Gerard shift uncomfortably on his chair.

Gertrude reaches for the box of tissues on edge of a nearby bookshelf without looking away from Rosalie and places it on the table between them, mostly to stop Gerard’s fidgeting. Rosalie takes one, but doesn’t use it, and when she looks back up at Gertrude her cheeks are dry and her face is stony. “I suppose you know what I found. That’s why Tabby called you, isn’t it?”

“Tabitha called me because we’re old friends, she knew I was going to be travelling through the area, and she needed the support during such a difficult time,” Gertrude says promptly. It’s almost entirely a lie, but it’s a believable lie and one that no one is likely to challenge, which is all Gertrude really bothers herself with these days. “I’d like to hear it from you.”

Rosalie doesn’t question whether Gertrude has the right to ask such questions, to demand such things of her.

They rarely do.

“She was at the bottom of the stairs. She was flat on her back, and at first I thought she’d fallen, down the stairs maybe – there’s a shaky one third from the bottom, I’m always telling Tabby we need to get it fixed. Maybe she did fall, but that’s not... that’s not what killed her. I rushed forward, hoping to—I’m not sure what I thought I could do. It’s not like I’m a paramedic. Stupid. I should have just called an ambulance, although I don’t think there’s much they could’ve done. She was already cold when I got to her, and the clothes she was wearing were the same ones I’d seen her in the day before. I touched her shoulder, I think, or maybe her arm. Have you ever touched a corpse, Mrs. Robinson?”

Rosalie continues without waiting for a response, sparing Gertrude the choice between lying or giving an answer which might require explanation. “There’s—I don’t have a queasy stomach. I’ve worked in housekeeping all my life and I have both seen and _smelled _some things. But there’s something really terrible about touching a dead body. They still _look_ like a person, like someone you know, but they don’t _feel_ like a person anymore. They’re too cold, too rigid. Nothing moves like it’s supposed to; I gave her arm a shake, and she wasn’t limp like someone is when they’re sleeping, but she also didn’t tense or push back against my hand. It’s like—I’m not a religious woman. My mom took me to church every week but it was mostly just so she could catch up with her friends, and my David, he had his bar mitzvah but his father, well, his father had a bad time before he came here, and he didn’t have much left in him of faith to pass on to his kids. We mostly just let _our_ kids go their own way. My youngest, she’s very into Buddhism right now, but last semester it was all about _getting in touch with her roots_, so we’ll see. What I’m saying is, I’m not sure I believe that there’s a soul, or any place to go after we’re gone, but touching someone who’s died, it’s like, like some vital spark has gone out of them, and you can _feel_ it, the empty space under their skin where they used to be.”

In all honesty, Gertrude is expecting another tiresome pause in Rosalie’s statement, but she just toys with the tissue in her hands, callused fingers idly ripping off pieces and placing them on the edge of the table, even though she will undoubtedly be the one who has to clean them up and throw them away later, and says, “That wasn’t the worst part, of course.”

“I was standing there, leaning over her, and—it was stupid. I _knew_ she was dead. There was nothing else she could be, and never mind what I thought I heard when I got there that morning. But when her mouth opened, for just a moment, I thought, _oh, good, look, she’s fine_.

“She wasn’t, of course. Her mouth had opened because something was coming out of it. _Crawling_ out of it, and it was dark in that basement but I swear I could see the light glinting off the back of its wings, wet from being inside—inside the body. A beetle. It was black with pale splotches, maybe half as long as my thumb, and its front legs kept making these short, jerky movements, like it was trying to feel its way off of Sylvia’s chin. Something touched my hand, but I couldn’t look away from that beetle, not until... not until I felt more of those tiny, grasping little feet on my skin.

“They came rushing out from under her clothes and it seemed like there were _hundreds _of them, black and shining and _twitching_ and—I screamed. Ran upstairs and locked the door behind me. Went out and sat in my car to wait for the police to arrive, and even that felt like it was too close. I kept checking my clothing and my hair to make sure that none of them had left the building with me. I couldn’t stop shaking, and it felt like it took a long time before I finally heard the sirens. Sort of started to regret that I gave up smoking thirty years ago. Might’ve made the waiting easier.”

Rosalie sighs. “There have been beetles in the basement for months, of course. I’ve had pest control out three times, but they keep coming back. There must be something down there they like, but I don’t know how so many of them got on Sylvia’s body. _In _Sylvia’s body. And I don’t know how I could’ve heard her calling to me, hours after she was dead.”

“Did you ever find out how she died?”

Gertrude has been told, of course, but she’s found there’s some value in getting information directly from the source, as it were, at least so long as _she’s_ the one getting it. Perhaps her mistake with the Usher Foundation, the start of this whole sorry mess, had been not doing so from the start.

Now is not the time to think of such things. She might not think of them at all. Gertrude is not much inclined to useless self-doubt and second-guessing. She hardly has the time.

“Heart attack,” Rosalie says, with a short, humorless little laugh. “She was twenty-four. It happens, I guess. Doesn’t seem right, though, does it? Heart attacks are for old ladies like us, not young things like them.” She jerks her chin in Gerard’s general direction, and conjures up, from some reserve of strength that Gertrude can almost appreciate, a shaky smile.

“Indeed.” Of course, she doubts that she’ll be so fortunate as to keel over quietly from natural causes. Gerard almost certainly won’t.

“Did you need anything else?” Rosalie asks. Her eyes are a little blank as they consider the pile of neatly shredded tissue in front of her.

“No. We’re finished here. Thank you for your time.”

“Sure.”

Gertrude hears Gerard stand. “I’ll walk you out,” he says, carefully careless, like he’s determined to prove that this little kindness means nothing at all. _A nice kid_, Gertrude thinks, and the way Rosalie Nowak’s phrasing echoes against the insides of her skull feels a little fond but mostly resigned.

“Oh,” Rosalie says, voice gone gentle with surprise. “Thank you.” She smiles again briefly at Gertrude, and there’s a ghost of her early wolfish humor to it, like they’re sharing a joke. Gertrude doesn’t understand what the punchline is supposed to be, and dips her head slightly in acknowledgement rather than smiling back.

At the door Rosalie pauses, forcing an abrupt stop from Gertrude’s wayward associate (she will always think _assistant_ for the briefest of moments before correcting herself, more habit than anything else, but Gerard is more ally than assistant, as Adelard was, and Gertrude has not allowed herself assistants in years). “There’s one more thing. I’m not sure it’s important.”

“Yes?”

“The beetles aren’t the only pests we’ve had. There were the mice. I think I said. They’ve been a problem for ages. It’s impossible to keep everything sealed up in a building this big and this old. When we started seeing the beetles, I called the exterminator, the one we’ve been using for years. He went into the basement, did whatever he does, same as usual, but he waved me down as he was leaving. Told me he’d seen plenty of beetles while he was down there, but not a single mouse.”

“Curious.”

Rosalie doesn’t immediately exit, and Gertrude sees the question lingering on the tip of her tongue long before she asks it. “You said that you think Tabby’s disappearance is linked to Sylvia’s death. Does that mean you think Tabby is dead, too?”

A complicated question. Gertrude doesn’t think that Tabitha Huang is dead. She _knows_ that Tabitha is dead. She in no way intends to tell Rosalie Nowak that. “I don’t know.”

Rosalie nods, accepting that, and leaves. Gerard shoots Gertrude a wry look over his shoulder and follows. Gertrude listens to their departing footsteps fade into nothing as they reach the stairs.

Gertrude has learned very little she didn’t already know.

**

Tabitha greets them at the door, as unwilling to stand on ceremony as ever, all flitting, bird-boned hands and plump, smiling cheeks. She has changed very little, although the laugh lines around her mouth and eyes are deeper and her hair has gone from salt-and-pepper to slate at some point since the last time Gertrude saw her. That’s to be expected. It’s been a number of years, which isn’t unusual. Rarely does Gertrude find cause to visit the Usher Foundation, and she doesn’t see the point in visiting without cause. Tabitha’s presence alone is not a sufficient inducement, although Gertrude isn’t displeased to see her. Gertrude would have characterized them more as amiable colleagues than friends (Tabitha would have disagreed), but at this point Tabitha is her longest standing living colleague, and she supposes that counts for something.

Tabitha insists on hugging her. It’s uncomfortable. When she lets her arms drop from Gertrude’s shoulders and steps back, she looks like she’s biting down on laugh, lips pressed tightly together. Gerard looks like he rather wants to laugh, too. He receives a perfectly cordial, perfectly professional handshake in greeting, and Gertrude tries not to feel envious.

“Oh, you haven’t changed at all.” Tabitha says it much more fondly than most people do when making that observation about Gertrude.

“This place has,” Gertrude says, idling smoothing a piece of wallpaper that has peeled away from the wall. The paint on the door is cracked and flaking. She remembers from her last visit the way that the old wood floors would glow golden in the afternoon light. Now they look gray-brown and dull, with a darker gray smear at the center of the hall where the most feet have trod.

“It’s falling apart,” Tabitha says cheerfully. “Black mold in the walls, beetles in the basement. I keep telling the Board that we need more funding, but, well. Blood from a stone, you know.”

Gertrude thinks about the quarterly expense reports she sends to Elias, each of them lengthier than the one that had come before. He’s yet to complain, although he’s looked more and more like he _wants_ to with every subsequent pile of receipts. She’ll break him yet. “Not really.”

“Gloating is unprofessional, Ms. Robinson.”

Gertrude almost smiles. “If you stopped paying people for their statements, your budget would be more than sufficient, Dr. Huang.”

It’s an argument of long standing—longer standing than either of their tenures, to be honest. Archivists and archival assistants at the Magnus Institute scoff and turn their noses up at the Americans’ practice of offering compensation for statements from the public, complaining that it incentivizes subjects to report fictions in exchange for financial reward. Usher Foundation librarians and researchers then point out that people with legitimate stories to tell are more likely to give up their Saturday to tell them if paid for their time. Gertrude once found a pile of increasingly vitriolic letters between the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute and the Head Librarian of the Usher Foundation from the 1930’s on the subject shoved into the back of a filing cabinet. The ongoing debate has got exponentially more aggravating and more _frequent_ with the advent of electronic communication. Gertrude makes sure to CC Elias on every e-mail chain she receives on the matter. He’s the head of the Institute. It’s important that he remain informed. It’s important to _her_ that he be forced to remain informed of every trivial annoyance that so much as brushes her desk.

Tabitha casts an amused look over her shoulder as she pushes open her office door. “Not all of us have your _talent_ for convincing people to share their stories, Gertrude.”

**

Mold and beetles. Is it any wonder that, even after she had realized that she was on the wrong track in seeking the Stranger here, she had thought that perhaps it was Filth that had made its home within these walls, as it had been in Paris? She still wonders if the clues hadn’t been there or if she had simply overlooked them. It hardly matters. The situation had been past salvaging long before her arrival at the Usher Foundation.

Gertrude is still sitting at the table when Gerard returns, nominally reviewing her bare bones notes on Rosalie Nowak’s statement but mostly just staring down at her own cramped handwriting on the page. She peers at him through the top of her bifocals as he sweeps the torn up bits of tissue off the edge of the table and into his cupped hand before tipping them into the nearby bin, pushed up against the end of one of the room’s many bookshelves. He returns to the table and leans over the chair previously occupied by Mrs. Nowak, elbows and forearms resting along the ornate back.

“Why are we doing this?” Gerard asks. “We already know what happened.”

There’s a crack in the wood of the chair’s top rail, dust settled into the twisting whorls and dips of an intricately carved pair of peafowl, their necks twined together and around each other at unlikely, uncomfortable angles and the feathers of their splayed tails unpleasantly reminiscent of eyes. For a moment, Gertrude is silent. She doesn’t have an answer to give him.


	2. Lucinda

_Case 0142410, cont. Statement of Lucinda Fenton, regarding the origins of the Usher Foundation and the weeks leading up to the death of Sylvia Ibarra. Usher Foundation, Washington D.C., 25th October 2014. Statement taken directly. _

Gertrude’s second subject is a little over five minutes late, but looks appropriately contrite upon arrival. Not contrite enough for Gertrude to forgive her for the lost time, but the effort doesn’t go unnoticed.

“Sorry,” says Lucinda Fenton, one of the Usher Foundation’s two assistant librarians. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting. There’s just so much to _do_ with Tabitha,” she chews her lower lip as she deliberates over what word to use; it’s probably a habit, because Gertrude can still see the faint traces of lipstick at the edges of her mouth, where her devouring little teeth have failed to completely decimate this morning’s application. The rest of her is perfectly polished, a sleek hurricane in a pencil skirt and heels that add an easy three inches to her not insignificant height.

“Away,” she finally decides, although she sounds politely unconvinced that this is at all an accurate way to describe the situation. She drops the paper bag in her hand on the table, the sides of it grease-spotted, and Gertrude’s head swims a little at the smell of cooked beef and onions, reminding her that she hasn’t eaten since sometime the day before. Dinner, she thinks, a rather tasteless chicken alfredo from the chain Italian restaurant half a block away from their motel, chased by a statement so old and well-read that it had made her mouth go dry. Already this tastes better, and all she has is the scent of it on the back of her tongue.

“I thought you two might be about ready for lunch,” Lucinda says, a hint of triumph in her voice, “and I’m not going to have any time to eat unless I do it now, so...”

She decides that she forgives Lucinda Fenton for her tardiness.

Gertrude is far too disciplined to lunge for the food first. After a moment in which the three of them wait in increasingly awkward silence, Gerard snorts. He hooks his fingers over the edge of the bag and tugs it closer to him. A sandwich wrapped in wax paper and a packet of crisps land on the table in front of him before he shoves it unceremoniously back in Gertrude’s direction. By the time she’s tipped the bag to look inside, he’s already got his mouth full of bread and salt beef, as devoted to the meal as—well, as a young man who hasn’t eaten since the previous night’s indifferent Italian.

Any questions Gertrude might have are deferred in favor of food. Gertrude feels a little stupid when she’s done, the meat and onions and cheese sitting heavy in her stomach. Lucinda seems to be feeling no such ill effects, and although Gertrude suspects that she feels her age less than most of her peers she does briefly feel a pang of envy, followed by the faintest twinge of unease. She had been about Lucinda’s age when she had become Archivist. She had been about Lucinda’s age when she had first met Tabitha, at the time an assistant librarian for the Usher Foundation, herself.

Lucinda climbs back to her feet, drifting around the edge of the table, giving Gerard the opportunity to lick the grease and salt from his fingertips and move to perch on the edge of the windowsill and Gertrude the chance to regain her food-addled wits. The girl pauses in front of the room’s massive fireplace. “I did wonder why you decided to hold these,” another little pause as she considers what euphemism she wishes to select, “meetings here. In the Usher Room.”

“The Usher Room?” Gertrude asks, even though she’s already reaching for the information in memories of her prior visits to the Foundation (she, as always, hopes that it’s her own memory alone providing her with the information).

Fingernails varnished to a mirror-like finish flick in the direction of the fireplace’s mantle before Lucinda turns back around to face them. “This is the room where we keep Mr. Poe’s statement and the book. Jerome used to go on and on about how they should be down in documents storage to preserve them. He’s not wrong, but I think Doctor Huang likes the history of it, likes being able to come in here and be reminded of how we got started.” She laughs. “And she’s got the last say, so here it stays.”

There’s a triptych on the mantelpiece, wood so worn it’s started to splinter framing age-yellowed pages densely packed in a hand both intricate and clearly rushed; even from here, Gertrude can see places where the ink bled through the paper or splattered as the statement was written. Beside it is a heavy casket, the brass inlay so tarnished it’s the same color as the wood. Predictably, Gerard’s eyes linger on the casket, ingrained curiosity or his mother’s training or both. “The book?” he asks.

“The _Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae_,” Lucinda says, with a certain sort of relish and no hesitation over the Latin. “Vigils for the Dead, according to the use of the Church of Mainz, from the library of Hezekiah Usher—which is where our founders got the name.” There’s still curiosity on Gerard’s face, but even if Gertrude weren’t already aware of the story behind the establishment of the Usher Foundation, she wouldn’t have been surprised. Jurgen is hardly the first man of his ilk, and his was not the first Library; in decades past it had been Mathers or Usher, Dee or Trithemius. “It was years before Poe turned his brush with the supernatural into a story, of course. Usher’s name is on the book’s endplate; that’s probably where he got it. His personal account is a little more, um, pedestrian than the one you’re familiar with. He embellished a bit for publication. No ancient houses or doomed old world lineage in our version, just a friend from the year he did at University of Virginia, before he dropped out and enlisted in the military. You’re welcome to read it, if you want – there’s a transcript upstairs. Of the statement, not the book. As far as I know, the book’s been locked up since it got here in 1831.” She leans forward grinning, ghoulish and eager as a child sharing a ghost story. “No one knows what happens if you read it, but it must be _bad_.”

“Fascinating,” Gertrude says, in a tone which indicates the opposite. “Is that what happened to Sylvia Ibarra?”

The grin fades from Lucinda’s face. “No, that,” she says haltingly, shaking her head. “That was a heart attack. I was—you can’t _die_ from reading a book.”

Gertrude almost pities her. Ignorance is no shield in their business, and Lucinda has been with the Usher Foundation for close to five years. If she hasn’t learned yet, Gertrude doesn’t much like her odds for lasting another five years. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Gerard try to catch her eye from his seat on the window’s ledge, undoubtedly to trade some kind of _look_ over Miss Fenton’s refusal to acknowledge the truth of the forces at work around her, but she ignores him. He sighs, and she hears the quiet _snick _of his cigarette lighter. He’s close enough to the window that most of the smoke ends up outside, and Gertrude is accustomed enough to his habits for it not to bother her. Lucinda glances in his direction, but after a moment she shrugs and returns to the seat across from Gertrude without volunteering any comment on the Foundation’s policy regarding smoking indoors. Gertrude isn’t surprised; the Usher Foundation’s Board has made it _very_ clear that Gertrude and her companion are to be obliged in every way, and not everyone has Rosalie Nowak’s backbone.

“You knew each other well?”

Lucinda has clearly recovered from Gertrude’s first question, but her polish isn’t firmly enough back in place to mask her little grimace at this one. “She hadn’t been here long,” she temporizes. _Away_, she had said of Tabitha’s absence, and _meetings_ she had called Gertrude’s afternoon of scheduled interrogations of the staff. She has the same air of careful deliberation when speaking of Sylvia Ibarra, and Gertrude doesn’t have time for it.

“You didn’t like her.” It’s not a question. It’s not a question in part because Gertrude knows that to make it one in her current mood would turn it into something _more_ that a question, and she has undoubtedly indulged in that impulse enough for one day by dragging painful recollections from Rosalie Nowak’s dawdling tongue.

“My mother taught me not to speak ill of the dead,” Lucinda says.

“My mother,” Gerard says around the butt of his cigarette, “told me that if the dead didn’t want to be spoken ill of, they shouldn’t have been so irritating in life.” He has a particular way of speaking about Mary, sometimes, like every word is a knife he’s twisting in his own belly and he’s determined not to flinch.

Lucinda doesn’t seem to notice, but she does laugh, and Gertrude would bet that it’s only the second unconsidered response she’s seen since this well-groomed creature walked into the room. “Yours too, huh?” She smiles like she’s holding a secret between her teeth in the moment before she decides to spit it out. “My mom was a _pill_. I mean, her being a pill got me into Rutgers, but it didn’t make growing up with her any easier.”

Gertrude catches Gerard’s eye and inclines her head slightly in Lucinda’s direction. If he’s built a rapport, him being the one to ask the questions seems a serviceable alternative to her pulling the answers she needs out of Lucinda by force. The look she receives in return is withering, undoubtedly a response to her earlier unwillingness to trade speaking glances over Lucinda’s oblivious little head, but after a few seconds he takes a final drag from his cigarette and stubs it out against the windowsill, leaving a black smear on the weathered white paint. 

“Sylvia?” he prompts, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, a second pair of eyes staring out from beneath the threadbare and torn knees of his jeans.

Any reticence has evaporated, and Lucinda rolls her eyes and gives the kind of shrug that shivers down from her shoulders through her wrists. “She was fine, I guess, but that girl was going to _All About Eve_ me, Doctor Huang, and everyone else here on her way to the top. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ambitious too, but _I’ll_ admit it. I’m going to be Head Librarian here, one day. My girlfriend thinks I’m nuts because I turned down a position with the National Archives last year. I thought about it, but,” the pause is brief, but noticeable to Gertrude, who is listening for it. “I would’ve been one of thousands, there. Here I’m one of two, and I’m near the top – Tabitha isn’t going to be head librarian forever, and Jerome is senior but he doesn’t want it. Plus, the work is interesting. Weird, but interesting.”

She sounds sincere. Gertrude is sure that she’s spent the months since she turned down that position with the National Archives convincing herself that she _is_ sincere and that not taking the offer had been her choice. On Gerard’s face Gertrude sees a flash of the pity she had almost felt, and this, this is why in the moments when she’s not worried about what Gerard will do, she worries for him. He’s soft, under it all, especially for someone raised by Mary. He’ll burn himself out on the world.

(He’ll burn himself out on her.)

It’s a useless thought. She buries it deep and returns her attention to the conversation playing out in front on her.

“Sylvia wanted it just as bad as I do, but she was all big ingénue eyes and _oh-no-I-could-nevers_. I mean, you know, you’ve talked to Rosalie. She thinks that the sun came shining out of Sylvia’s—smile. Now that Sylvia’s dead, I half think that she’s going to try to get her _canonized_ or something.” She sighs. “I—she’s dead. I don’t want to make it sound like she was some kind of monster, because she wasn’t, and it’s not like I think she deserved to die, or that no one should be sad about it. _I’m_ a little sad about it, just because, I mean, you know a person, right? She works right downstairs from you, you bring each other files, and suddenly she’s _gone_. But no, I didn’t like her. Jerome didn’t either, but that might just be because he, uh.”

“Yes,” Gertrude says, “I have met Jerome West.”

“Him, I like,” Lucinda says, and there’s a hint of a challenge in the way she meets Gertrude’s eyes and lifts her chin, one that Gertrude hadn’t expected given how eager Lucinda has been to please them and – by extension – appease the Board. Ambitious, then, but loyal too. “He showed me the ropes when I started here. He didn’t have to. And he’s been good to me since. He just doesn’t have a lot of patience for,” another of those little pauses, and Gertrude can see the moment that Lucinda gives up on the polite pretense that this is a normal professional meeting. “Bullshit. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for bullshit, and Sylvia was full of it.”

It doesn’t sound very much like the Jerome West Gertrude had once known. He had been ambitious, himself, too ambitious to see a young thing with her eye on a position he must also covet as anything other than competition. Gertrude has always been under the impression that his anger when she had been named as Head Archivist of the Usher Foundation’s sister organization, even though the previous head librarian had put his name forth for consideration, had been half thwarted professional aspirations and half good, old-fashioned chauvinism. Lucinda Fenton seems like an unlikely person for him to take a shine to, and Gertrude legitimately can’t imagine him setting himself up as some kind of beneficent mentor.

“Was she?” Gerard asks, dragging both Gertrude’s wandering thoughts and the conversation back into line.

“She was always sneaking around,” Lucinda says. “At first I didn’t notice, because she made a point of getting here earlier than me and leaving later, but once I forgot my metro card on my desk and I had to double back to get it. The lights were all out and the doors were locked, so I thought I was the only one here. I about jumped out of my skin when I heard someone rifling around up there. I should’ve called the police, I guess, but I didn’t—I couldn’t convince myself that it was anything serious. We’ve had mice in the Foundation before, or maybe someone was just wrapping up for the night and that’s why the lights were out, and really, who’s going to want to rob _us_? And it _wasn’t_ anything serious, not really. I followed the noise to Doctor Huang’s office. The door was open, and I know she locks it up when she’s not there, but I looked in and there was Sylvia, pawing through the desk drawers, bold as you please.”

“What did you do?”

“I asked her about it. She gave me some story about, oh, I don’t even remember. Some file she was looking for, I think. That’s terrible, isn’t it? One of the last conversations we had, and it got ugly, and I don’t even really remember what she said. I remember I wasn’t convinced. I told her that if she was legitimately supposed to be in there at nine o’clock at night, then it wouldn’t _matter_ if I went to Doctor Huang with it. So I did, first thing the next morning. I’m not a _rat_ or anything, if she had just been coming back late from lunch or messing around with her phone when she should’ve been working I wouldn’t have said anything, whether I liked her or not, but digging around in the boss’ locked office after everyone else was gone for the day? That was strange. I had to say something.”

The corner of Gerard’s lips have twisted up into a little half-smile that doesn’t look entirely approving to Gertrude’s eye. She’s certain that reporting one’s coworkers to management isn’t very _punk rock_ or _metal_ or whatever it is that he considers himself. Gertrude is less certain how she feels about it. On the one hand, she would very much like to know if one of the Institute’s employees were to have a snoop around her office after hours, for all that she keeps very little of import there these days. On the other hand, she’s well aware that certain of her own actions would appear _strange_ to the rank-and-file, and would prefer not to have word of them whispered into Elias’ ear.

“Did she get in trouble?” Gerard asks.

“I don’t know. Doctor Huang called her in the next morning, and she didn’t come out for a while. When she did, she looked upset. Maybe even a little scared? I mean, they didn’t tell her to pack up her desk or anything, but I guess Doctor Huang was taking it seriously.”

“Anything else?”

Lucinda hesitates. Her body is turned to face Gerard, but Gertrude can see the way that her eyes dart for just a moment in Gertrude’s direction. “I can step out,” Gertrude says, “if there’s something you’d rather I not hear.” Her willingness to be obliging is token; anything of note, Gerard will relay to her.

“No, it’s fine,” Lucinda says, and then she sighs. “We’ve just been trying to keep word of it from getting back to the Board.” She shivers a little when she mentions them. Gertrude wonders if she’s examined her own dread at the thought of the Foundation’s governing body, or if she’s explained it away as a very reasonable and normal desire not to get sacked. “Just handle it on our own. But you report to them, so—.”

“I do not,” Gertrude says firmly. “Your Board has been kind enough to oblige me because of the long relationship between our two institutions. What I decide to share with them of my findings is entirely at my own discretion.”

There are any number of libraries and archives and research centers the world over that share a common cause and a certain level of mutual cooperation with the Magnus Institute, some of them older than Jonah Magnus’ creation, some of them better funded or more well-respected. The Institute does not, strictly speaking, control any of its sister organizations; the Usher Foundation has its Board and the Pu Songling Research Center its head librarian, neither of whom look to Elias Bouchard for instruction.

The Institute is the only one with an Archivist, however, and that Gertrude _is_ the Archivist gives her a certain amount of leeway, professional courtesies extended to her and doors opened that might otherwise remain closed.

“So you might not share what I’ve told you?” Lucinda asks, a hopeful lilt to her voice.

Really, Gertrude doesn’t intend to share _anything_ she’s learned with the Usher Foundation’s Board, but it’s probably best not to say that to one so determined to please her superiors. She manages a thin smile and instead says, “I see no reason why we can’t keep this just between us girls.”

She pretends not to hear the choked noise Gerard makes.

Lucinda sighs again and toys with one of her earrings. “Some of the statements have been going missing,” she finally says. “I don’t know for how long—I didn’t start to notice until I was trying to cross-reference one we got a couple months ago with a case from the mid-nineties, and it wasn’t where the system said it was supposed to be.” Such a thing would not have been extraordinary at the Archives, but Tabitha runs a somewhat tighter ship. “I figured one of the assistant researchers had misfiled it, but then I found another one missing, and another. I told Jerome, but he’s, well, he’s been distracted since Anne, you know?” Gertrude does not, but she’s also fairly certain she doesn’t care. “Anyone would be, but it was almost like he didn’t _care_ that there were statements missing. He asked me to see if I could catalog the missing statements, said we should try to handle it internally first, before going to the Board.”

“How many statements?” Gertrude asks, and the way that Lucinda goes from idly toying with her earring to twisting the elegant little pearl stud in its hole tells her more than any answer Lucinda might give.

“About two hundred that I’ve found,” Lucinda lets go of the earring abruptly, as if she’s just become aware of how revealing that particular nervous tick is. She doesn’t seem to notice that her teeth worry at her lower lip for a moment before she elaborates. “Two hundred and twenty-one. There might be more. There’s no real rhyme or reason to _which_ ones are missing, not that I can tell.”

“You said that you told Jerome. Where was Tabitha during all this?”

“She’s been gone a lot,” Lucinda says. “Even before she—before she went missing a few days ago. I don’t want to repeat office gossip, but maybe it will help you: it’s been going around that maybe she’s been having problems with her health.” She’s tilted her face away from Gertrude, back in Gerard’s direction, but she’s not looking at him, her eyes fixed on some distant point past his shoulder and out the open window. “Sylvia’s dead. Doctor Huang is missing. We’re losing statements. Nothing here has been as it should be, not for a while.”

**

“I know that you’ve had your own misfortunes,” Tabitha is saying, which is a very polite way of recognizing that none of Gertrude’s assistants have survived her tenure as Archivist, “and it’s not like Sylvia is the first one I’ve lost, but it never stops hurting.”

Gertrude doesn’t respond, because she cannot commiserate. Tabitha has always been a soft touch, especially with her staff. That doesn’t appear to have changed.

Said staff has long since departed for the evening, and the large room outside of Tabitha’s office door is dark and silent, only empty desks stained and scarred by the decades of assistant librarians who have come and gone before. Inside the office is close and warm, the overhead fluorescents turned off in favor of a desk lamp that casts a kind of golden gloom over the room, the corners dark where the light can’t reach.

The bourbon Tabitha has poured her is golden too. The sides of the heavy glass are frosted with condensation. An identical glass sits on the desk in front of the Usher Foundation’s head librarian, but she’s barely touched it.

If she had, perhaps Gertrude could have reached for that as an explanation for the way Tabitha staggers when she stands. She catches herself against the edge of the desk before Gertrude can even rise fully to her feet. “I’m fine,” she says. It’s not particularly convincing. “Just tired, I think.” She lowers herself back into her chair, and her smile strange in the uncertain lamp light, deep shadows pooling between her lips and in the corners of her eyes. “Either that, or I’m getting old.”

“You can’t be old,” Gertrude says, “because that would mean _I’m_ old. I distinctly remember from that terrible birthday party you insisted on throwing yourself in San Tropez that you are, in fact, three years _younger_ than me.”

Tabitha starts laughing, although Gertrude would deny under torture that it had been a joke. “Well, what did you expect? I was _working_ on my _birthday_. Because _you_ asked me to, I believe. God, what was it we were even after? Some kind of cursed idol, right? That terrible little man at the Hotel Byblos.”

“He was—certainly the worst part of our time at the Hotel Byblos,” Gertrude murmurs, and later she will blame the warm glow of bourbon in her stomach for her brief lapse into nostalgia, even though she also hasn’t taken more than a few sips. She does, foolishly, find Tabitha’s reaction reassuring. There are few creatures of the Stranger who are so entirely convincing when questioned; she knows of only one, and Adelard had taken that particular monster well in hand and put it somewhere out of the way some years ago now. Gertrude had checked the inventory of artefacts held by the Usher Foundation upon her arrival, just to make sure, and the only table they have in storage is a delicate Victorian dining table at which a gentleman of particular wealth and stature had once been served. According to contemporary accounts from several dinner party guests, he had been delicious. 

“I envy your young man a little,” Tabitha says, and it takes Gertrude a moment to realize she’s referring to Gerard, safely cloistered at their motel for the night. There have been many young men. “I miss it.” Her laughter has faded, but the smile lingers. “Sometimes, it feels like I haven’t left this desk for years.”

**

Lucinda Fenton has barely gathered the remains of their lunch and exited before Gertrude is on her feet. She ignores Gerard’s curious gaze on her back as she crosses the room, until she is in front of the fireplace. She doesn’t hesitate, because Gertrude has never been a woman much given to hesitation; she just reaches out and presses her fingertips against the lid of the wood-and-brass casket on the mantelpiece.

It swings open easily, in spite of Lucinda’s assurance that the box is kept locked. Hinges almost two hundred years old offer little resistance. When Gertrude tilts the casket to look inside, she’s unsurprised to find it empty.


	3. Jerome

_Case 0142410, cont. Statement of Jerome West, regarding his employment with the Usher Foundation and his professional relationship Doctor Tabitha Huang. Usher Foundation, Washington D.C., 25th October 2014. Statement taken directly. _

“You should go,” Gertrude says. “I’ve known Jerome for a long time. He’ll speak more openly if I’m the only one present.”

Gerard does her the courtesy of pretending to think about it before he folds his long limbs back onto the edge of the windowsill and lights another cigarette. “No.” He inhales deeply and adds, words half-muffled by smoke on the exhale. “I’ll be quiet as a mouse, I promise. Which is very quiet, since all the mice here are dead.”

Cheeky boy.

“As we both know,” Gertrude says, “being dead is not necessarily an impediment to speech.”

He ducks his head, sending dull black hair sliding across his face, but not before she sees the edge of his smile. Of course he’s smiling. She sometimes smiles too, when she’s winning.

She’s still looking at Gerard when Jerome clears his throat from the doorway. Age doesn’t sit as kindly on him as it had on Tabitha; the bags beneath his eyes are pronounced, and his hair has started to thin. He’s staring at Gerard, and Gertrude will admit that she’s looking a little forward to invoking the name of the Usher Foundation’s dreaded Board when he says something about her associate’s gently smoldering cigarette. It’s petty, but Gertrude has always believed that pettiness has its place, when earned, and Jerome had foolishly once made something of a pastime of earning hers.

“Do you mind if I join you?” he asks. “I’ve had a long—.” He pauses. Glances in her direction. His lips are thinner than they once were, but the crooked smile is familiar. “Forty, fifty years. Does that sound about right, Robinson?”

“Buck up, West,” she says, without much sympathy. “It’s not over yet.”

“Of course not,” he replies. He tilts his head, looking her up and down as though they haven’t already seen more than enough of each other in the past week. “You’re still here. Nothing unpleasant has ever been permitted to end while Gertrude Robinson is in the room.” 

Gertrude considers him a moment. “Are you _drunk_?”

“Pleasantly tipsy,” he says. “Tabitha keeps a truly magnificent stash of bourbon in her office. I thought it might liven up my coffee, and make this conversation a little more tolerable. Nothing that will interfere with me answering your questions. Not that anything _would_ prevent me from answering your questions, were you to set your mind to it.” He returns his attention to Gerard. “So?”

“Sure,” Gerard says, and moves his legs far enough for Jerome to lean against the edge of the open window beside him without either of them encroaching on the other’s space.

“You don’t drink,” Gertrude says, once he’s settled, smoke curling idly his gaunt face. She remembers that much from Tabitha’s atrocious birthday party, and a number of more regimented but equally terrible social engagements in the years since.

“Things change,” Jerome says. He takes a long drag on his cigarette and exhales into the room. Gertrude resolutely refuses to allow her expression to change as a cloud of expelled smoke forms in the air between them, gray and acrid-sharp. “Do you know when I first realized that I couldn’t leave this place? That none of us could?”

Beside him, Gerard is tense and silent. She _had_ warned him, although apparently she needn’t have worried about persuading Jerome to speak openly. Tabitha’s excellent bourbon has done half her work for her. “That’s not what we’re here to discuss.”

“It was when my Anne first got her diagnosis,” Jerome says, as if she hadn’t said anything at all. “Tabitha spoke to one of our donors, someone who could pull the right strings. They got her into some kind of trial at Stanford, very cutting edge. I was supposed to go with her. I _wanted_ to go with her, and it wasn’t like I didn’t have the PTO saved up. I hadn’t taken a day off in years.” Another brief pause, the cherry on his cigarette glowing an accusatory red. “I started to feel uncomfortable after a few days. Then I got shaky. Then it got so bad that I had to come back, because _somehow_ I knew that returning to the Foundation would make it better. Anne went into remission. I had another twenty years with her. But I don’t think my wife ever really forgave me for leaving her there alone, while she lost her hair and vomited into a hotel toilet without me. What was I supposed to say, to make her understand? Sorry, darling, it turns out that work really _is_ more important.”

Gertrude is well aware that it’s hypocritical of her, but, “You might’ve tried the truth.”

“When has that every helped anyone?” he asks. “It doesn’t matter now, in any case.”

“I was sorry to hear,” she says. “I didn’t know her well, but she seemed like a lovely woman. Far too good for you.”

“Ah,” he says, “finally something we agree on.” She thinks he almost smiles at her before he remembers himself. “Ask your questions. And I do mean _ask_.” He does smile now, but there’s no real humor in it. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

He’s a little drunk and he holds himself like a man who’s hurting. A kinder woman would hesitate. “What do you know about Sylvia Ibarra’s death and Tabitha’s... disappearance?”

Jerome isn’t as tightly bound to the Beholding as Gertrude – or even as Tabitha or Gerard, for that matter – but he’s carried its mark since he was in his twenties, and that’s enough for him to feel the compulsion wash over him, as most of her victims (for she finds it best to call them what they are) do not, as he hadn’t the first time she had done this to him, both of them young and new and her less reluctant then to leave burnt offerings at the altar of a watchful god whose existence she had barely begun to recognize, and certainly had not had time to learn to hate. In this one way, Jerome is fortunate to have signed an employment contact with the Usher Foundation; she doubts that either of them would have enjoyed having her walking through his dreams every night for the past five decades, although she flatters herself that he has nonetheless had at least a few nightmares which feature her over the years.

He takes another puff on his cigarette and holds the smoke in his mouth, fighting against the urge to answer her question until he can’t anymore, like a man keeping his fingers over an open flame a few moments too long just to prove that he can.

“I think,” he says on the exhale, “that there was a time when I might’ve noticed when things first started going wrong. Years ago, before I realized how much of my life this job had claimed. Maybe even after. I _did_ try for a while. I couldn’t leave, so I thought I would make the most of it, really _excel_ at feeding whatever it is that lives in this place, or at least revise our access policy and keep our collection DACS compliant.” His smile is small and strained, and Gertrude doesn’t think the mocking edge to it is directed at her. “Pointless, I suppose. Idiotic. Then, for a few years, I went the other way. Thought that maybe I could stick pins in the Foundation from the inside, or perhaps just try to make sure that no one else got caught up in all of this the way I did. I scared away a few promising job candidates while HR was still busy typing out their employment contracts, put a few piles of resumes through the shredder before Tabitha and the Board had a chance to review them, that sort of thing.

“Maybe I even would have made some headway if Tabitha hadn’t been in charge, but she’s always—I’ve known her for so long, we’ve been friends for so long, but I don’t understand her, not really. I never have. I don’t think she’s ever really doubted our mission or our charter, not even for a minute. She’s not stupid. She never thought that working for the Usher Foundation was good, or noble. But she always thought it was _worthwhile_, that filling the archive with other people’s tragedies was something that needed to be done. That recording and cataloging and indexing it all, preserving this library of horrors for posterity, that doing all of that served some kind of purpose. She gave everything to her work, and I don’t think she ever regretted it the way I did.” He lifted his shoulder in half of a weary shrug. “Maybe that’s why they chose her to be head librarian. Maybe that’s why they chose _you_ as Archivist.”

Gertrude thinks about a warehouse full of C-4, but Jerome has never known half as much about what’s going on as he thinks he does. She feels no need to correct him now. “You can’t still be angry about that,” she says instead.

“You can’t still think,” Jerome says, “that I dislike you because you beat me out for a promotion forty-odd years ago. I dislike you on your own merits, Robinson. It’s exceedingly personal.”

Perhaps the subsequent stare down would have lasted longer had Gerard not seen fit to pointedly clear his throat. Jerome starts a little and casts a rueful look in the direction of their audience of one before he continues. “To be frank, for the last few years I haven’t been as attentive to any of it as I once was. You can judge me for that if you like, but at a certain point I realized that I was never going to get out of here, that there was no expiration date on my service to the Usher Foundation other than actually _expiring_. Anne used to talk about us retiring when I was ready, somewhere warmer and cheaper than D.C. I had my savings, and she had her pension from DCPS. Sarasota, maybe, or Asheville. It sounded nice. I was lying to her every time I pretended it was an option. And then she got sick again. After that, what was the point of caring about—any of it, really? Lucinda insists on believing that I’m grieving my wife, but it’s not just that. How much are you allowed to mourn for a life, Robinson? How much are you allowed to mourn for _your_ life, the one you might’ve had? The one you gave up without even knowing what you were signing away?”

“I have always thought that _might have_ is rather a waste of time,” Gertrude says.

“Of course you do.” Gertrude expects him to attempt glaring her into submission again, expects to have to nudge his narrative back on course, but he just shakes his head. “I guess it started with Rosalie.”

Gertrude lifts a brow. “I would have thought Sylvia Ibarra, or the missing statements.”

He offers another one of those little shrugs, one shoulder jerking beneath his polo neck like he’s too tired to entirely commit to the gesture. “She was always complaining about something to Tabitha, and when Tabitha wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything about it, she would complain to me, like _I _could convince the Board to increase the facilities budget. Mice in the basement—well, there have always been mice. Wallpaper peeling, black mold, weather stripping coming off the windows, a crack in the foundation. That beetle infestation we had a few months back, although they must’ve never gone away, because... well, you’ve talked to Rosalie, so you must know the state that the Ibarra girl’s body was found in. There’s always been _something_ – it’s an old building – but for the last few months it’s seemed like there’s a new problem every other day. I didn’t think much of it at the time.” He snorts. “Well, I did think _maybe this place is finally going to come down on all our heads, that’ll be nice_.”

“And now?”

There is no weight to the question, no attempt to compel an answer from him, and he continues as though he hasn’t heard. “About six weeks after she started, Ibarra tried to come to me about something. I wish I could tell you what; it was probably important if she was willing to bother me with it, because I hadn’t made much of a secret out of finding her irritating. She was always offering to fetch me coffee and help with my files, even though she was supposed to be downstairs in research. Once or twice I stumbled on her in one of the reading rooms with a stack of cases I _knew_ she hadn’t been assigned. I even found her in here once, fiddling with the lock on that thing.” He jerks his chin toward the wooden casket on the mantle. “Maybe that was why she came to me. Maybe she thought that confiding in me would keep me from reporting her to Tabitha for trying to steal a look at the _Vigilae._ She was new. She couldn’t have known how little I cared about her skirting the rules and, my personal feelings aside, I ought to have heard her out, but it was—a bad day. A few days later she broke into Tabitha’s office, and Lucinda ended up being the one to report her. Less than a week later, she was dead.”

He sighs and flicks his cigarette out the window. Gerard leans out to check where it lands, undoubtedly to make sure that the leaf debris and dry grass outside isn’t about to catch fire. Gertrude approves. She isn’t necessarily adverse to the thought of burning the Usher Foundation to the ground, but she’d prefer not to do so while she’s inside and otherwise occupied. “I should’ve made my coffee livelier,” Jerome mutters.

“You _should_ get to the point,” Gertrude says. “You didn’t find the death suspicious?”

“I left that to the police.” This time, when Gertrude stares at him he looks away first. “I thought—Lucinda had informed me by then about some missing statements. Maybe it was just the natural decay of an old building, nothing of note, but some days it seemed like we were one stiff breeze away from Rosalie coming to tell me that the windows had fallen out of the walls. _Something_ was clearly going on. I had Lucinda start inventorying the statements and I signed off on Rosalie calling pest control, but I knew better than to look into it more closely than that. I didn’t _want_ to know more, if I’m being honest. But Ibarra? She was digging around in the files, trying to look at an artifact that we keep locked up for a reason, rooting around in the head librarian’s desk. She was prying, and we both know that’s not a safe thing to do, not here. I thought that maybe she had found out more than she was supposed to, _seen_ something she shouldn’t have, and that the power that claims the Foundation and its staff had perhaps decided to eliminate a threat. Or, no, not a threat. I won’t flatter any of us by pretending that _it_ considers _us_ a threat. A potential inconvenience.”

Gerard is watching Jerome out of the corner of his eye, a second cigarette held loose between his knuckles. “You don’t think that anymore,” Gertrude says.

“I don’t know _what_ I think,” Jerome says. “Maybe she was killed to make sure she didn’t discover some horrible truth. Maybe she was the one stealing or destroying statements. Of course, if I’m going to accuse her of that, maybe I should just assume _she_ was the reason the Foundation has been falling apart; the hinges on the front door rusted through the week she started. Nearly fell on our mail lady. Maybe your boss and my bosses have been _squabbling_, and she was a spy send to gather intel. She realized that Tabitha was on to her and bit down on the cyanide capsule she kept in a trick tooth. They all seem about equally likely. I’d probably know for sure, if I’d gotten over myself long enough to listen to her.”

“You’re being awfully flippant about a young woman’s death.”

“We’re all going to die here,” he says. “Ibarra just sped up the timeline by fifty or sixty years. Very efficient of her. She probably would’ve earned that promotion she wanted, had she stuck around a while longer.”

“Flippant and _paranoid_.”

“Of course I’m paranoid.” His voice is very flat, but there’s something feverish bright about his dark, heavy-lidded eyes. “_Something is always watching me_.”

Gertrude feels her lip curl. The Jerome West she had once known had been smug and priggish, but he had been capable. This Jerome West is significantly less useful. She doesn’t look directly at Gerard. What she can see his face doing in her peripheral vision is more than enough.

“And Tabitha?” Gertrude asks. “Do you think that Ms. Ibarra confided in her, once she was found out?”

“How would I know?” He sounds tired. He sounds _bitter_, and that at least is more like the Jerome she remembers. “We used to talk about—not everything. Tabitha has her secrets, like you have yours, but for most of our lives we’ve run this place together. We argue, but always about little things. We disagree about—a great deal, especially when it comes to the Foundation, but I think we’ve both always recognized that there’s not much point in fighting about it when neither of us are likely to change. Mostly we get along. There was a time when I would have known exactly what happened in that meeting. There was a time when I would have _been_ in any meeting that dealt with such a serious disciplinary issue. But she didn’t ask me. Maybe she finally realized that I really don’t care anymore what happens here, but I don’t think that’s it.”

“Oh?”

“She’s been avoiding me recently,” Jerome says. “And I know what you’re thinking, Robinson. _Who wouldn’t?_ Or maybe just _took her long enough_. But Tabitha, she’s—I couldn’t get rid of her after Anne died. She was always dropping by my desk for lunch, or sending Lucinda to check up on me. She’d insist on driving me home after work and sticking around for a while, ordering us take-out and rolling my garbage out to the curb.” He rolled his eyes. “It was too much. I missed it when she stopped, though. Not just the showing up at my desk or by my house, but everything. She wouldn’t talk to me unless she had to. It wasn’t as bad with Lucinda or with the researchers – I don’t think they even noticed – but she was here less, and when she was here, half the time she would lock herself in her office. She _never_ used to do that. You know Tabitha. She _prided_ herself on her open-door policy. The only time it was every locked was if she wasn’t there or if she was doing something she really didn’t want interrupted, like recording a statement or doing the payroll. Officially, she’s been missing for two days, but it started long before that.”

He looks at her, and whatever wild emotion had briefly lit his gaze has faded. _Tired_ is not really an adequate word. There’s something numb and dull behind his eyes and, unbidden, the phrase _dead man walking_ drifts through Gertrude’s head.

Equally unbidden, she feels a brief pang of pity, the same pity she had seen flash across Gerard’s face while talking to Lucinda Fenton, the same pity one might feel for any animal with its leg caught in a trap. She thinks, for just a moment, of the last time she spoke to Eric Delano, or what was left of Eric Delano, but even as the thought occurs to her she knows she won’t say anything. Too much is riding on her keeping that particular ace in the hole for her to risk revealing it for _Jerome West_, of all people. He will live, and he will die, and the hours in between will undoubtedly be unpleasant for him; he’s hardly the first one to suffer such complaints.

“You know that, though,” he says. “It’s why I called you.”

**

It is coincidence that Gertrude is purchasing their tickets to fly into O’Hare when she receives the call.

“Robinson?”

It takes her a moment to place the voice. The American accent does narrow the field a bit, and her instinctual desire to frown at the phone a bit more, but even then she needs that moment. Gertrude’s acquaintances are varied, and she dislikes many of them.

“West.”

“I need your help. I think—something is very wrong.”

Something is always wrong. _Wrong_ is the default state of the universe. Still, Jerome West is many things, and to name some of them would require using the kind of language which Gertrude rarely indulges in, but he is not an alarmist. “Very dramatic. Very intriguing. Do tell me more.”

“You’re still awful,” he says, but he does tell her.

Gertrude would enjoy laughing at him and hanging up, but she has to admit that she’s concerned. She’s been watching the Stranger more closely recently, and she’s, well, she’s possibly done some things to earn the ire of those who follow it. That aside, the enmity between I-Do-Not-Know-You and the Ceaseless Watcher is well documented and, while she has always considered the Institute the most likely place for them to strike, it’s entirely possible that they would decide to select a somewhat... softer target.

She hopes it isn’t so. It would be potentially beneficial to be able to observe the Stranger’s machinations in a setting where she inherently has the advantage, but she’s—passing fond of Tabitha Huang. There’s history there. It would be a shame for something to have happened to the Usher Foundation’s head librarian.

“Robinson?”

She clicks the _back_ button on her browser, and deletes ORD in the box asking her to select her destination. She selects IAD instead.

“You owe Tabitha this much. You owe _me_.”

She knows to what he refers. A few minutes by the pool of a hotel in France, the moon reflecting against the water and the silence of the night stretched rather than broken by the distant sound of their colleagues’ revelry. Her own irritation thick in her chest – younger then, and much more easily baited by a workplace rival’s prodding over a recent promotion – and a question. A story, banal now with years of similar stories to compare it to, about a debilitating childhood fear of the dark and the things which might be lurking in it that had lingered into adolescence, given teeth and claws and a name, impressive only because he had survived.

Sometimes she acknowledges that it was not her promotion to Archivist which had lodged itself in Jerome’s throat and made him hate her, not entirely, although frustrated ambition undoubtedly had some role. It had been that. That moment, that moonlit pool, that tale coaxed unwilling from his lips.

“I owe you nothing,” Gertrude says, “but I’ll come, nonetheless. _Do_ stay out of my way, West.”

**

“Are we _done_?”

“Almost,” Gertrude says. She gestures to the chair across from her.

“Oh, come on,” Gerard says. “You know everything I know, Gertrude. You were _there_.”

“I’d like to hear it from you.”

He sighs, but he lights a new cigarette on the butt of the last and pushes himself off of the windowsill. He’s watching her closely as he settles himself into the chair, and she wonders in passing what he _thinks_ he sees. He slumps a little against the wooden peacocks and says, in a passable imitation of her diction, “Statement of Gerard Keay, given twenty-fifth of October, two thousand and fourteen, Usher Foundation, Washington D.C., regarding—.”

“Regarding?”

He’s silent a moment, the set of his mouth going somber. The tattoos on his knuckles glow briefly red as he inhales, reflected light from the cigarette held between his fingers. “Regarding a dead woman. Statement begi—.”

She interrupts again, holding up a hand to stop him. “It’s not a statement.” Neither of them need her haunting his dreams. _She _doesn’t need the questions he would ask, were that to happen. “But I would appreciate hearing your... perspective.”

He exhales slowly, turning his head so he’s not breathing smoke directly at her. “Yeah,” he says. “Fine. I’ll tell you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sincere apologies to any actual librarians or archivists, much like gertrude i have no goddamn idea how any of it works.


	4. Gerard

_Case 0142410, cont. Statement of Gerard Keay, regarding a body. Usher Foundation, Washington D.C., 25th October 2014. Statement taken directly. _

“It all started,” Gerard says, “when we landed at Dulles. Which was surprising, because I really thought that we were going to Chicago.”

Gertrude, who has heard this particular complaint already, is not impressed. “It’s hardly my fault you had your headphones in during the boarding call. Do get on with it, please.” Long acquaintance and constant contact have bred familiarity, however, and her acid earns her nothing but a small, pleased-with-himself smile. It doesn’t last long. His smiles rarely do, and Gertrude would not be nearly so tolerant of him were he unable to recognize when the time has come to settle down to business.

“I guess I don’t need to go over every little detail? Like I said, you were there. We found a motel, stowed our stuff, and headed over here straightaway. Your friend, Tabitha, she greeted us at the front door. You told her that you were here to look through some of the statements—also surprising, since you’d told _me_ that we were stopping by to look into some trouble they’d been having. I guess now I know why. She wasn’t the one who called you.”

There’s a certain note to his voice, wry and almost bitter, an acknowledgement that Jerome’s involvement in her decision to come here is the least of the secrets she’s keeping. Gertrude meets his gaze levelly, and Gerard doesn’t look away. He does continue to speak after a moment, reminding her that while he won’t be cowed by her, he also generally obliges her. It’s a state of affairs that Gertrude finds mostly satisfactory, if occasionally exasperating. “You went to do—whatever it is you do. Maybe you really did read over some of the statements. Tabitha insisted on showing me around. The grand tour, she called it.” He considers briefly, tipping ash from his cigarette into the dustbin, which he has dragged closer to his seat. “I liked her.”

A lot of people became alarmed when Gertrude took Gerard places. Dressing him in a suit sometimes helped, but the knuckle tattoos and the hair and the general air of disaffected youth would always give a certain sort of person pause. Tabitha had looked at him and very visibly decided not to care in the split second before she had taken Gerard’s hand. Gertrude supposes that, after several decades as head librarian of the Usher Foundation, very few things gave Tabitha reason to pause, but it wasn’t just that. She had always been—very deliberately unfussy. It made her easy to like. Unsurprising that Gerard had not been entirely immune, when even Gertrude had been forced to concede that Doctor Tabitha Huang had few objectionable qualities, her misguided devotion to the Usher Foundation aside—although that too had waned, at the end.

“You like me,” she says. “I’m uncertain that you’re a qualified judge of character.” He smiles again, but he doesn’t laugh. He knows it isn’t a joke.

“The next few days, you mostly spent with the good doctor. I dug around here and chatted with the staff, found out what I could about Ibarra’s death. One of the research assistants mentioned the vanished statements to me; if Lucinda really thinks she’s keeping that on the down-low, she’s dead wrong. I went through them myself, but it was like she said, no real pattern in _what_ was missing. More like whoever was doing the vanishing was concerned with quantity instead of quality; some of those files are clearly marked as unsubstantiated or discredited in the system. It didn’t seem like there was much here, other than the disappearing statements. The death could’ve been a natural one, or at least—well, we both know this isn’t the safest line of work. Could’ve been that she just did follow up on the wrong case or spent a little too much time with the wrong artefact, and something nasty caught up to her. Sad, but not a sign of some big conspiracy or something sinister waiting in the wings.” He shakes his head. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure why we were still here. Even you said that that there was no sign of the Stranger’s involvement, or anything _else’s_ involvement, for that matter.” His fingers skitter against the table in a way she’s sure is meant to illustrate crawling legs. “Thanks for sending me to look in on the basement alone, by the way. Really appreciated that. No beetles. No mice, either. The mice were there once, though. I found a couple nests. Found what was left of the mice, too.”

“Dead,” she says. “Yes, you told me.”

“_Picked over_. It’s like a little mouse ossuary down there.”

“Charming.”

“The beetles _did _get a mention in the autopsy report,” Gertrude doesn’t ask how he had got a look at the medical examiner’s records, as she hadn’t when he had first told her; Gerard has always been a resourceful boy. “_Necrophila americana. _Carrion beetle. Two were found in Ibarra’s clothes. Not exactly the multitude Mrs. Nowak describes, but it backs up her story.” It’s all old information, and when Gertrude does not prompt him for further revelations he frowns. “Why _did_ we stay? I mean, we were right to, but why?”

Nothing. Very literally _nothing_, because when it had started to seem that Jerome’s suspicions would lead to naught, she had tried to _know_, and found—an absence. Not the obscuring fog of the One Alone, not blinding Darkness or the muddle of almost-known-but-not that she associates with the Stranger, just a blank spot, dead air, like the information she needed had been blotted out of existence and, for the briefest of moments, like by trying to look, to see, to know, she had stuck some echoing and empty chord deep in her own chest.

It had been very uncomfortable. She had not tried again. Trying and failing, however, had given her enough: it had told her that there was something _to_ know.

“Just a feeling, I suppose.”

“Sure.” He doesn’t look convinced. He’s never really trusted her, not completely. Gertrude supposes that she’ll have to address that eventually, either by inviting him further into her confidence or by finding a way to smother whatever lingering misgivings he might have about following her blind. She’s laid a solid foundation, should she decide to pursue that option; he’s grateful still for her intercession with Mary and he _does_ like her. She can turn herself into what she needs to be to pacify his doubt and make certain that he will do what is required of him when the time comes. She’s done it before, even if she would prefer not to take that particular route with Gerard.

Regardless, she will need to decide soon. The Unknowing can be delayed, but not in perpetuity.

“We’d been here—was it three days?” Gertrude nods but remains silent, her gaze fixed and her hands folded on the table in front of her. “We were here three days when Doc Huang went missing, and you looked—.” He stops, eyeing her warily.

“How did I look, Gerard?”

“Sad,” he says, and then, “Satisfied.” Gertrude says nothing. “At first, no one seemed to think much of it, but when she still hadn’t shown up the day after that and none of her staff could reach her, West went off and checked her flat. No sign of her. Everyone was worried.” He shrugs. “Of course they were, especially with everything that’s been going on around here lately. Everyone except you. You just stood there, watching the panic like you’d been _expecting_ it.” He goes to take another drag on his cigarette, but it’s burned out between his fingers, and he frowns down the half inch of ash at the tip for a moment before tossing the butt into the bin and looking back at her. “Why was that?”

_Because I was waiting for the worst_, she thinks but does not say. Because she is a pragmatist. Because there were few people who could have found Sylvia Ibarra alone in the basement and late in the night without anyone else noticing aught amiss, few people who could have vanished two hundred and twenty-one statements before anyone thought to check. Because Jerome West, for all his faults, is not an alarmist, but he _is_ paranoid, and his circle of trust is not a large one. Because nothing gold can stay. Because—.

Because it had felt _right_, a hideous dark and secret knowledge deep in the marrow of her bones and resounding like the most golden and most unwished for of truths at the base of her skull, long before she had ever fitted it to words and found a way to rationalize her suppositions with evidence.

“That’s about what I thought,” Gerard says on a sigh, the wry twist of his lips inviting her in on another secret, one more poorly kept with every passing day and called: _you won’t tell me, and I didn’t really expect you to_.

“Finish your story,” Gertrude says.

**

They are not meant to be here, but for once they do not have to break into a place where they are not meant to be: the Board has graciously provided Gertrude with a key. It’s long past dark, but Gerard’s eyes are bright and alert in the puddled shadows outside the Usher Foundation and Gertrude was sensible enough to nap before leaving the motel; they’re neither of them unaccustomed to late night skullduggery.

Inside, it is dark and silent as a tomb. Even the scuff of their shoes against the floor seems muffled, and Gertrude’s breathing sounds steady and loud in her ears.

Gertrude has run out of leads to follow, which is the only reason they’re prowling around a deserted archive in the middle of the night. She hasn’t troubled herself overmuch with the Foundation’s researchers or administrative assistants or receptionists, but Gerard has spent the past week learning their faces and names, and he had been the one to notice that, while the rest of the staff worked themselves into a lather over Tabitha’s absence, one of the researchers had been fretting over something entirely different.

Three newly taken statements, already reviewed and logged by the assistant librarians and left in the researcher’s in tray just before the end of the work day. An in tray filled with nothing but dust come morning, and no indication that one of their coworkers had decided to lighten their load. They were a junior researcher, _the_ most junior of the researchers with Ibarra dead, not there more than ten months, more anxious about having to make another foray into the job market than they were about the disappearance of a woman they probably hadn’t exchanged more than two dozen words with since being hired. Somewhere else, missing files might have been a minor point of concern, but inside the Usher Foundation, with the feeling of watching eyes and malicious intent in every corner of every room, even a small professional misstep might feel like a disaster.

Gertrude does occasionally wonder if it would be better or worse for the new ones, to know that they very literally cannot be dismissed, even if they also can’t leave. Perhaps some of the youngsters would appreciate the job security.

Sylvia Ibarra had been found first thing in the morning, wearing the previous day’s clothes. The statements vanish by night. It’s a place to start, at least, and if there’s little to be found then they will have lost nothing but a few hours of sleep.

Something in Gertrude is not surprised to find the Foundation’s lost head librarian sitting in her office, the door open so that the warm light of the desk lamp bleeds out and touches the tips of Gertrude’s loafers. Finding Tabitha seated there feels _right_, a hideous dark and secret knowledge deep in the marrow of Gertrude’s bones and resounding like the most golden and most unwished for of truths at the base of her skull. Tabitha is statue still, hands resting palm down with fingers splayed on her desk’s blotter. Between her spread thumbs is a book, the corners of its red cloth cover frayed and the pages foxed with age. The soft light smoothes out the lines on her face and makes her look as young as the girl she had once been, but her countenance is curiously slack and her eyes are blank and staring. There’s something—_wrong_ about her eyes, but Gertrude doesn’t realize what it is until Tabitha turns her head to look at them.

The slash of color through the whites of Tabitha’s eyes looks like a wound, two triangles the reddish-brown of dried blood, tapering to a point near the eyelid and wide to either side of irises gone milky and opaque. Gertrude has seen something like it before. _Tache noir de la sclerotique_, it’s called. An accumulation of mucus and cell debris on the sclera which darkens over time. It happens when the eyes of a cadaver are left open for too long after death.

Gertrude doesn’t have much room for mourning in her. She’s used it all up over the years, bit by bit, and what few dusty drops she might have had left in her she had poured out over a year ago for a man who had known her too well to expect her to grieve him. She does feel the briefest pang of regret, however, looking at the still-moving corpse of Doctor Tabitha Huang. Tabitha had not been a friend, but she had been the longest standing of Gertrude’s living colleagues, and that had counted for something.

“Gertrude,” says the corpse, very cordially. It still sounds like Tabitha. Even the smile is the same.

“Tabitha,” says Gertrude, with a brief nod of her head.

“Shit,” says Gerard. He says it without much inflection. She supposes that after Mary, he can’t summon much horror for a dead woman still walking.

“I died here, you know,” Tabitha says. Other than her lips, she doesn’t move at all. She doesn’t blink. Gertrude tries to remember if she has seen Tabitha blink at any point during her sojourn at the Usher Foundation, then discards the question as pointless. “I’d been having troubles, of course. My heart. I locked my door and started on the payroll one afternoon, and it just—gave out on me, I guess. I think it hurt. It must have. But that’s not the part that I remember.”

She takes a deep breath, but it seems deliberate, an intentionality to something that should be reflexive that strikes Gertrude as deeply unnatural. She doesn’t exhale, and her chest doesn’t move again. “I remember sitting here, with my cheek pressed against this desk, looking at that wall, while my joints got stiff and my skin went cold. I could—_feel_ my blood cooling in my veins. I could feel my _cells_ dying, one by one. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even close my eyes. I sat here, trapped in my own body, feeling it begin to decay around me, all through the night. The next morning I heard my staff come in, and I thought _thank god_, because I knew that one of them would find me, but then I started to worry that Jerome wouldn’t... he was the only one I ever told that I wanted to be cremated. We see so many things, don’t we? Even before this happened, I knew it would be best for me not to leave a body. He’s been distracted, recently, though. Since Anne died. No reason to think he might remember, and what if I ended up trapped like this, deep in the ground? What if he had me embalmed? Even if I decayed, would I still be present, aware of each one of my organs liquefying and soaking into the coffin lining?”

She presses her hands down on the desk to either side of the book and stands. It takes no effort for Gertrude not to flinch or step back, because she has spent years teaching herself through experience to never be the first one to cede ground. “They never found me,” Tabitha says. “Someone knocked on my door, but when I didn’t answer, they moved on. I could hear them out there, arguing about the Kaur statement, laughing, going about their day, and they didn’t even seem to notice I was gone.” She takes another breath, and Gertrude doesn’t think the shudder at the end is quite so planned; perhaps some habits die harder. “I could _feel_ it. Watching me. The Beholding. All my fear of being found, of never being found, just drinking it in, like I had never been anything to it at all. Like I was a specimen pinned to a card, only there for it to examine and catalog.”

“That is,” Gertrude says, “more or less how it operates.” She hears the quick hiss of Gerard’s breath, like he’s trying to warn her against saying something so very unsympathetic to the monster at the other side of this room, but Gertrude has taught herself never to cede ground first. She steps further into the office.

“I know that now,” Tabitha says, and, “I knew that before, I think. I still hoped, I suppose. And when the hope burned out, when it _died_, I felt—I’d spent so much of my life here, serving _it_, trying to do my best by _them, _and at the moment when I most needed my people, when I most needed my patron, there was just... nothing. I devoted my _life_ to this place. Was I angry? Hurt? I’m sorry, Gertrude, I’m sure that you of all people want to know what my experience was like, but it all feels very—not even like the memory of feeling something, now. Like dreaming of remembering feeling something. Where there had been the thirst to _know_ and the desire to do right by the Foundation and by my staff, something else filled me up. I found that I could move again, and that my skin was once more my skin. I was—peaceful, for the first time in what felt like a long time, even though it had been barely more than a day. And I knew that I had work to do.”

“What work was that?” Gertrude asks. When she takes another step, Tabitha comes around the desk to meet her, leaving a dangerous six inches of space between them. It’s unquestionably foolish, but Gertrude has learned that there is nothing to be gained through fear. One does not convince a wolf to stop barring its teeth by running, by becoming _prey_. No predator respects its meal. Fear is unproductive.

“Do you know,” Tabitha says, all of her attention fixed unwavering on Gertrude, “what great men fear most?”

“I’m certain you’re about to tell me.” Out of the corner of her eye, Gertrude sees movement. She does not look.

“It’s not death. Not the death of the body, at least, although they _do_ fear that. Who doesn’t? Death is the shiver down the spine of every living thing, the sure knowledge that we—we _end_. We’re finite. Except that doesn’t have to be _entirely_ true.” She pauses, smiles again. “Don’t look at me like that, Gertrude, I’m not talking about an afterlife. I’m talking about the desire to leave our mark on _this_ world, and on the people around us. The hope that we’ll live on in memory, if not in flesh. And great men, men like your Jonah Magnus, men like the ones who poured their money and power into creating the Usher Foundation, they find a thin sort of comfort in that, a flimsy shield against the terror of their own nullification: that some part of their life and their work will live on. They don’t fear that history will remember them as monsters, they fear that history won’t remember them at all, that all of their considerable influence will wane with the last shuddering beats of their shriveled little hearts.

“Human memory is such a transient medium, though. Nothing so pedestrian and ephemeral will do for _such_ great men. For them to survive beyond the span of a single lifetime, something more permanent must be created. So they build themselves legacies. Monuments. Edifices.” She sweeps her hand out to encompass the building around them, and Gertrude doesn’t so much as sway when Tabitha’s outstretched fingers brush against the front of her jumper. “They forget that all things end. Eventually.”

Her gesturing hand hovers over the desk, and for a moment Gertrude has to force herself not to react, not to turn her head and _look_, but Tabitha just scoops a pile of paper out of her in tray. She thumbs through the pages, and there’s something not quite right about the way she moves, a stiffness to the flick of her thumb over the paper. “Statement of Rebecca Sara Schultz, taken September 4th, 2014.” The cheap white printer paper is turning yellow between her fingers. “Begin statement. _I was sixteen when I met Jen, and I think I decided in that first moment that I didn’t like her at all_.” Black smudges and pinprick holes appear on the page, and although Gertrude is, she can admit, an indifferent archivist at best, even she can recognize the signs of a booklice infestation. The edge of the papers in Tabitha’s hand have gone brittle enough to split. “_Aaron, that’s my brother, he was head over heels for her, but as soon as I saw them pulling up in the driveway of my mom’s house, I decided_—_I_—. Hmm. _I decided I..._” The paper is nothing but shreds between Tabitha’s curled fingers, and then it’s not even that, just a fine patina of dust on her palms. She shrugs. “End statement, I guess.”

“You wish to end their work,” Gertrude says. “Their legacy.”

“Mmm. Would you like to know which of our records I destroyed first? A series of letters between Jonah Magnus and several _great men_ of slight local importance and not insubstantial wealth, regarding their plans to create what would someday become the Usher Foundation.” She lifts her gaze from what is left of Rebecca Schultz’s statement. “I’m sure you knew their names, once. I’m sure you could have _known_ their names, once.”

Gertrude sees no point in making the attempt. Tabitha’s smile grows a little wider. It no longer looks very much like Tabitha’s smile.

“Not just the legacy, of course,” Tabitha adds. “The edifice.” The office is small and the light is dim, but Gertrude is certain that the wallpaper seems darker, dingier than it had when she had entered. The floorboards creak beneath her feet, even though she hasn’t shifted her weight.

“I would appreciate if you didn’t bring it down around our ears, dear.”

“Oh, this old pile of bricks has a few bad years left in it. You know Terminus has always been the most patient of the powers. No use in rushing the inevitable.”

“And yet I assume you were responsible for hurrying Sylvia Ibarra an abrupt end.”

“A tragedy, but unavoidable.” Tabitha has always been a soft touch with her staff, and Gertrude is almost sad to note that she hears no real regret in the words. “That one, she was a good choice for Beholding. Curious. Insatiable. Observant. _Very_ committed to her work. I know some of the others think that she was hungry for a promotion, but I think it was a different kind of hunger. She wanted to know more, and she was fascinated by what she found here. She was always peeping into places she shouldn’t have, staying late to read through the statements and pull closed files that had caught her interest. It was inevitable that eventually she would see too much. I couldn’t tell you when she began to suspect me; perhaps she saw me here one night. Perhaps she realized that statements weren’t all that had gone missing.” She begins to turn toward her desk.

Gertrude speaks quickly, drawing her attention back. “Beetles seem a strange choice, even the kind who eat the dead. At first I suspected the Filth’s involvement.”

“Opportunists. Maybe the Corruption did see an opening – it’s always been a impetuous, greedy thing, and it doesn’t much like being watched – or maybe they were simply scavengers, drawn here because they knew that I would provide them with a meal.”

Dead eyes meet hers, and for just a moment she feels—an absence, something which was once there but is no longer, and a feeling like she has stuck some echoing and empty chord deep in her own chest.

It’s uncomfortable.

She thinks she might have made some noise, some unavoidable physiological nuisance of a reaction, breath catching quick in the back of her throat. She sees Gerard move from where he has been hovering in her peripheral vision, faster than she thinks advisable or even necessary, given how thoroughly Tabitha is focused on the distraction Gertrude has provided, but she supposes that she appreciates the concern.

Tabitha is turning, reaching, as soon as he moves, and perhaps she has known from the start that he was there, creeping along the edges of her office to reach his goal. Decaying flesh and dead muscle are not quite a match for a spry young man, even one who smokes like a chimney; Gerard’s fingers close first around the edge of the book on top of Tabitha’s desk, his shirt sleeve pulled low to offer an uncertain scrap of protection between him and the binding. He scrambles back a step, his zippo already lit and upraised in his off hand.

Gertrude almost smiles. Gerard is not entirely predictable, but she _can_ trust that if there is some foreboding tome of dubious origin and undoubtedly dreadful purpose placed prominently in a room, his eyes will go straight to it.

Her satisfaction is short-lived, because it is no longer Gertrude that Tabitha is standing dangerously close to, and is no longer Gertrude held in place by that flat, lifeless gaze. “Did you think to frighten me by threatening that dusty old thing?” Tabitha murmurs. “Please, let me save you the trouble.” She reaches out.

“Tabitha,” Gertrude says, sharp. “Don’t.”

Tabitha tuts softly. “I’m not going to _hurt_ him, Gertrude.” Her lips are still curved, the shadows cast by the lamp pooled deep around her mouth and eyes. “I’ll leave that to you.” Her fingers brush against the book, almost lovingly.

The red cloth of the cover fades further, and begins to fray. The foxed pages darken, and crack, and crumble. In seconds, Gerard is holding nothing but loose thread and the ashes of whatever had once been contained within.

True to her word, Tabitha steps back and away from Gerard. “I told you. Everything ends, eventually.” She turns to Gertrude. “That book made me what I am, but I no longer need it. It made the _Usher Foundation_ what it is, and now it has unmade the Usher Foundation. You have to admit, there’s a certain poetry in that.”

“I never much _liked_ poetry.”

“That’s because you lack both romance and imagination,” Tabitha says, and there’s almost a trace of the laughing woman that Gertrude had known in her voice when she says it. Gerard takes a sudden, shuddering breath, like he’s just come up from beneath dark water or back into his own skin. Neither of them look at him. “If I try to leave, will you try to stop me?”

Gertrude considers, but she’s hasn’t lived this long by being anything but practical. “No.” She steps to the side, leaving a clear path to the door. “What will you do now?”

“Does it matter?”

If Gertrude could stamp out that small stirring of curiosity within herself, she would have long since done it. “Not really.”

“But you want to know.” Tabitha watches her silently for a moment, then takes a stiff, stalking stride toward the door. “And you might even approve. There are other edifices. Other monuments. Surely some of them deserve to come toppling down.”

Any other questions she might wish to ask Gertrude keeps behind her teeth, but Gerard has never felt the need to restrain his desire to _know_ quite so ruthlessly. “Do you care if they deserve it?”

“Not really.” Something almost wistful passes across Tabitha’s face, but it doesn’t linger long. “I think I might have, once.” She looks around at the four walls of the office that has been hers for the last forty years. “Or maybe not. I did spend my whole life dedicated to this one.”

“Don’t see how destroying something built by men who’ve been dead for centuries feeds your god,” Gerard says. “They can’t exactly be afraid anymore.”

“You’d be surprised.” Gertrude doesn’t bother to tell Tabitha that very little actually surprises Gerard Keay. “How do you think the Usher Foundation’s current board of directors will feel, while they watch it all fall to pieces, regardless of what they do—or don’t do, they’ve never been very good at _doing_, they’ll probably convince themselves that they’re waiting for the opportune moment to act until the very end. How do you think the heiress will feel, when she wakes in the middle of the night and realizes that she can no longer remember the name or face of the patriarch who built the family fortune?” She looks at Gertrude. “Do you think I could provoke a reaction from Mr. Bouchard, were I to give it my all?”

“I might not object to you trying.”

Tabitha tilts her head back and laughs. She sounds very like herself. “Maybe I’ll see you again, in that case.” She glances at Gerard, and her mouth purses thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’ll see you again. A pity.” She lifts a hand sluggishly, her middle finger drifting across her temple as she tucks her slate gray hair behind her ear. “Goodbye, Gertrude.”

Gertrude says nothing. After a moment, Tabitha shakes her head and continues her slow, jerking progression forward.

She stops when she draws even with Gertrude. She leans in. Gertrude does not flinch.

“It is a terrible thing to die alone,” she whispers, “but Gertrude, we all die alone.”

Gertrude breaths in deeply. By the time she exhales, Tabitha is gone.

The minutes tick by. Finally, Gerard opens his mouth and asks—.

**

“Are you ready to go?”

The twilight outside the window has deepened to true darkness, although it’s early yet, this time of year. Outside of the reading room, the Usher Foundation is slowly growing quiet, the staff departing one by one after a day undoubtedly spent more on speculation about Tabitha’s absence and Gertrude’s continued presence than on work.

“Yes.”

There’s nothing more to see here.


	5. Coda

_Case 0142410. Coda._

All motels are the same. There’s something a bit comforting in that. A Home Inn in Beijing is a Hotel F1 in Paris is a Motel 6 in D.C., with very little to distinguish between them beyond whether the obligatory contrast wall is yellow or blue or orange. The ice machine rattles ominously as Gerry leaves his room, but that’s familiar too; he’s started to worry that when he does manage to sleep somewhere further than twenty feet from a motorway, he won’t be able to do it.

_Sleep_ is starting to sound very appealing after the night and day he’s had, and he lights a cigarette on the walkway before he knocks on Gertrude’s door, intending for it to be his last of the evening.

“Come in,” she says, muffled but clear through the door. She probably knows it’s him. Gerry has noticed that Gertrude knows a _lot_ of things she really has no right knowing. He twists the knob and pushes the door open but doesn’t step inside, resting his forearms against the door frame and leaning forward without actually crossing the threshold.

Gertrude is sitting on her bed, hair shower damp and frown firmly in place, as familiar now as the shuddering ice machine or the roar of passing traffic. She has a jumper spread out in her lap, the same soft gray one she had been wearing earlier, and that seems to be where her frown is directed: one of her fingers is poking through a hole in the front where the wool has frayed and unraveled.

“Rotten luck,” he says, without much sympathy, because it’s not his fault that Gertrude prides herself in travelling with no more than three changes of clothing at any given time, nothing more than she can fit in the undersized rucksack currently slung across the room’s fold-out luggage rack. 

She looks up at him, and her expression smooths out. “Indeed.”

The silence starts to become uncomfortable, and Gerry is resigned to being the one to break it. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“She wasn’t a friend.”

He snorts. “Of course not.” He considers her a moment. “What did she say to you, there at the end?”

She meets his gaze, and he knows that she’s going to lie to him even before she opens her mouth. She doesn’t break eye contact while she does it. “Nothing of any particular importance. Vague threats, _I’ll see you again_, the usual sort of thing.”

He doesn’t mean for it to, but when he exhales it sounds like a sigh. He brings the cigarette to his lips, and inhales deep, until he can feel the burn of it caught somewhere at the base of his throat.

“If I—.”

She stops.

Gerry looks at her. He thinks about remaining silent, but curiosity gets the best of him. “If you _what_?”

She doesn’t say anything. He’s pretty sure she won’t, that they’ll just sit there and pretend it isn’t awkward until he finally goes back to his room, but after a minute her expression goes stark and stubborn. Like the frown, it’s a familiar look on her. “We’ve had a number of near misses recently, you and I. There are things you ought to know, should I—should something happen to me.”

He feels like a bit of an idiot for the way his stomach squirms at the thought. “All right,” he says, and takes another puff on his cigarette.

Gertrude takes a deep breath. There’s probably something wrong with her – with both of them – that honesty takes so much work. “There’s a storage unit under the name of Jan Kelly, on an industrial estate near Hainault. If you need to stop the Unknowing without me, you’ll find everything you need to do it there.”

“You’re not going to tell me _what_ I’ll find.” It’s not a question, and he gets the answer he expects.

“No.” There’s a light in her eyes, like she wants to laugh, like there’s a joke he’s not getting, although Gerry knows that there isn’t. Gertrude doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. It’s the only disappointing thing about her. “I’ll show you, though, when we get back to London.” When Gerry doesn’t respond, she adds, shocking soft, “I promise.”

It’s not very satisfying. It’s still more than he’s ever got off her willingly.

She says nothing else. After a moment, he sighs again. “’Night, Gertrude.”

“Good night, Gerard.”

He closes the door behind him. He’s still standing outside, his elbows resting against the railing of the first floor walkway, when he hears the lock click into place behind him. Neither of them really believe in the protective power of locks anymore, but he supposes that both of them take their small comforts where they can find them.

There’s a headache starting behind his right eye, sharp and throbbing. He’s been getting a lot of them recently; too many days in cramped aeroplanes filled with other people’s recycled air, too many nights on rock hard motel mattresses. He drops his cigarette and grinds it out beneath the heel of his boot. There’s aspirin and water in his room, and once he’s had those there’s the siren song of sleep, and motel sheets so determinedly clean they’ll sting against his skin.

It’s not like a headache will kill him.

> “I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror."
> 
> \- Edgar Allan Poe, _The Fall of the House of Usher_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm on [tumblr](https://things-with-teeth.tumblr.com/), please feel free to come scream with me as we approach the season finale.


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